The following abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined as follows:
API application program interface
CDN content delivery/distribution network
HA home agent
HTTP hypertext transfer protocol (RFC 2616)
RDF resource description framework
SSL secure sockets layer
SSO single sign on
TLS transparent layer security (RFC 5246)
QUID universally unique identifier (RFC 4122)
A protocol known as OAuth (http//oauth.net) enables websites or applications (consumers) to access protected resources from a web service (service provider) via an API, without requiring users to disclose their service provider credentials to the consumers. In general, OAuth creates a freely-implementable and generic methodology for API authentication.
The RDF data model (www.w3.org/RDF) is based upon making statements about resources (in particular Web resources) in the form of subject-predicate-object expressions, referred to as “triples”. The subject denotes the resource, while the predicate denotes traits or aspects of the resource and expresses a relationship between the subject and the object.
A “cloud” may be considered to refer to a collection of resources (e.g., hardware resources and/or software resources) that are provided and maintained, relative to a particular user, by one or more third parties. The collection of resources is accessible by the particular user over a data communications network. The data communications network can be a wireline network and/or a wireless network, and may embody the Internet and/or a local area network (LAN). The resources can provide services to the user, such as data storage services, word processing services, and other types of services and/or applications that are conventionally associated with person computers and/or local servers.
Some representative US Published Patent Applications that relate to clouds include: US 2008/0077638 A1, “Distributed Storage in a Computing Environment”, Monk et al.; US 2008/0080526 A1, “Migrating Data to New Cloud”, Gounares et al.; and US 2009/0088142 A1, “Device Migration”, Baribault et al.
For a case where the cloud provides distributed data storage for a user it may be referred to as a “data cloud”.
A problem that arises in such a scenario is how to best provide security and privacy for a particular user's data in the data cloud so as to, for example, prevent unauthorized access to the user's data.